[Mailman-Developers] EOL handling in Mailman

[John W. Baxter]

On 3/19/2005 23:43, "Sylvain Beucler" <beuc at beuc.net> wrote:

> Savane uses the PHP "mail()" function, that executes the local
> sendmail-compatible command.
> 
> At both GNU Savannah (savannah.gnu.org) and Gna! (gna.org), we use the
> Exim version packaged by Debian. In both cases, the mail we receive
> via mailing lists (and in the Mailman archives) have the newlines
> doubled. The mails we receive at our personnal mail addresses is
> correct (no doubling). As far as I'm concerned, line doubling _does_
> look ugly and unprofessional ;)
> 
> As a result, I was under the impression that Mailman is the one that
> doubles the newlines. Now maybe Exim as an SMTP server (not as a
> sendmail-compatible command) is doubling lines. But are you completely
> sure Mailman (or a Python library used by Mailman) is not converting
> \r\n to \n\n?

Ever since Philip Hazel tried to accommodate some broken email producers by
messing with incoming line endings, there have been problems with products
broken in different ways.  As I recall, Philip has done various tuneups over
the last many Exim versions.

You didn't say what version of Exim is running in your Debian
installation...there are backports of newish Exim versions available which
would likely fix your problem.

Note that switching from the Exim 3.x series to Exim 4.x involves a
significant reconfiguration of Exim...it's likely best done by running
debconfig and answering the Exim configuration questions as if you were
starting from scratch.  This will not be something to tackle the day before
a vacations on your production server.

  --John